LS-DYNA White Paper

Scaling Up LS-DYNA Implicit Analysis

Overcoming performance bottlenecks

Rolls-Royce challenged Cray, Livermore Software Technology Corp. (LSTC) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) to demonstrate that implicit finite element analyses of large-scale models could be performed in a timely manner using large-scale computing systems.

Then Rolls-Royce created a family of dummy engine models, using solid elements, with as many as 200,000,000 degrees of freedom. NCSA ran these with specialized LS-DYNA variants, generated by Cray, on their “Blue Waters” supercomputer, a hybrid Cray® XE™/XK™ system with 360,000 cores. Processing and memory bottlenecks were revealed as the number of processors increased by an order of magnitude beyond that familiar to today’s developers and users — and LSTC made improvements to LS-DYNA.

Find out more in this white paper, “Increasing the Scale of LS-DYNA Implicit Analysis,” by Cray, LSTC, NCSA and Rolls-Royce.

It takes an in-depth look at:

Challengers the researchers encountered

Improvements madeto LS-DYNA

The results ofextending scaling limits

The paper was presented at the 15th LS-DYNA International Conference & Users Meeting in 2018.

High-fidelity simulations of the aeroelastic flutter experienced by an airplane in flight put extreme demands on machine performance. A combination of Cray hardware and ANSYS software scaled a 13.47-million-node simulation to more than 1,000 cores.